Abstract
Dirofilaria repens and Dirofilaria immitis are the most common filarial species affecting humans in Europe. Dirofilaria repens causes subcutaneous or ocular infection, whereas D. immitis is responsible mainly for the pulmonary form. In this report, we present the first human case of periorbital dirofilariasis in the Czech Republic. A 58-year-old woman suffered from an eyelid oedema, redness and pain in the left eye. After excising the parasite from her eyelid, all clinical symptoms disappeared. Based on the morphology and cytochrome oxidase I sequencing, the parasite was identified as D. repens. Histology revealed that the excised worm was female with absent microfilariae in uteri. With respect to the length of the incubation period and the sequence identity with a known Czech isolate, we concluded that D. repens was most likely of autochthonous origin.
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Data availability
Corresponding photos of the worm are included in MS (Fig. 1). Representative nucleic acid sequence was submitted to GenBank® (NCBI) under the accession number MW017212.
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Funding
The study was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic under the project FIT (Pharmacology, Immunotherapy, nanoToxicology) CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000495 and by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic, institutional support MZE-RO0518.
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JG, JO, PK, LN, and AN performed laboratory investigation. PH carried out clinical observation of the patient. AN, JO, and RS analysed and interpreted the data. AN and JG wrote the draft of the manuscript. All authors critically revised the manuscript for intellectual content, read, and approved the final manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from the patient in the study.
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Gebauer, J., Ondruš, J., Kulich, P. et al. The first case of periorbital human dirofilariasis in the Czech Republic. Parasitol Res 120, 739–742 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-07003-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-07003-9